Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. The truth is that there was a fire, six people died, and it was intentionally set. The spirit of Lisa prevails to help us understand … all of it.

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Lisa Landers, age seven

September 26, 1969

A chess game: that was the dream. My brother Harry had been teaching me how to play. But now, instead of moving the pieces around the board, I WAS one of the pieces: little, with a round head, a pawn. A giant’s hand blocked the light as it reached down to pluck me off the board.

That’s when it happened, this thing I never imagined.

My mother yanked me out of my dream as Sue, beside me, yelled into the dark.  What’s happening? I broke free from my mother’s grasp and raced for the hallway. Something was different. Why was the hall light off,  and what was that orange glow?

There was yelling. So much yelling. Mummy, her voice frantic, yelling, “Lisa!” as she tackled me in the hallway. K.C., just four years old, her cry sounding more toddler than big girl, bawling in the bed the three of us shared, not knowing what was happening. Sue, shouting, “What are you doing?” as Daddy pushed open the window.

My mother dragged me back into the room and grabbed K.C. with her other arm, not daring to let me go. Daddy climbed out onto the little roof and pulled Sue out with him—the two of them framed by the window, outlined in streetlight, moonlight. Sue disappeared and as Daddy screamed, “Nancy!” to my mother, that’s right when something awful happened. Something more awful than being grabbed out of bed for no reason.

A dark oven, a furnace, swallowed us. Heat. Smoke. With one breath I pulled it inside me—a hot monster inside my chest.

My last breath.

My mother’s arm relaxed. Was I melting into the floor, dissolving?

And then, like a “pop” but without the sound I was looking down at the room. I had risen up and out of my mother’s arms like one of those kids in Peter Pan flying out the nursery window.

I could see my father on the roof, trying to get in through that open window (So close! Just a few feet away from us!) and screaming, screaming my mother’s name, over and over.

Oh, that heat and smoke—the heat that kept him out like it was a wall. I knew his skin was burning, his lungs were burning from trying to enter that furnace, from wanting to pull us out. I looked down at the three of us on the floor: Mummy in the middle, face down, me under one arm, K.C. under the other, both of us face up. None of us three were moving. I should go back, that’s all I could think. Where was everybody else? My brothers? And cousin Joe?

I floated higher. I didn’t decide to do that, it just happened. But it wasn’t scary. It was like I’d been sprinkled with fairy dust. And then I could see the whole house. Harry, Mike, Sue, and Joe, all running around the house, looking for a way back in to pull us out. Mike throwing a hubcap up at the upstairs window where Davey, Kevin, and Billy were asleep, trying to wake them up.

Those boys in their beds were slowly breathing in the smoke, slower and shallower with every breath, their noses and mouths ringed with soot.

It was starting to feel like I was watching a movie, watching someone else play a game of chess. Like none of it mattered, not really, but it was still kind of interesting. I was floating farther away, above the house across the street.

That’s when I remembered something I used to know, before—before I was Lisa: When a pawn is captured, or a queen, or even the king, the pieces know in their hearts that it’s just a matter of time until the board is reset, with everyone in place. Just a matter of time. The thing is, they forget this while they’re still on the board! This felt important, like I should tell somebody. But how? And who?

At last, the fire trucks were on the way. The rotating red lights, the sirens. All the neighbors’ windows lit up. Standing back, between two houses, watching—smiling—was a man. I recognized him. A friend, kind of, of Harry’s, another teenager. And that’s when I knew: he’s the one who slipped into our house and set the fire.

The hand who plucked me, a faceless pawn, out of the game. He was smiling.

Suddenly, I was rocketing across the sky and that was all I could think about—about where I was going and whether anyone was outside in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky and could they see me, a shooting star, zooming back to heaven?

Janis Jaquith’s radio commentaries have been heard on Virginia NPR stations and nationally on Marketplace. She was a newspaper columnist for The Charlottesville Daily Progress and for Charlottesville’s newsweekly, The Hook. She has received awards from The Virginia Press Association for her columns. Jaquith grew up near Boston, earned a BA from the University of Massachusetts, studied at the Sorbonne, and attended the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student of linguistics. She lives in Virginia. You can read some of her collection of radio essays, Birdseed Cookies: A Fractured Memoir, on her website, www.radioessays.com.
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